CCPR/C/127/D/2912/2016
Facts as presented by the authors
2.1
In September 1939, Soviet troops invaded Eastern Poland and around 250,000 Polish
soldiers, border guards, police officers, prison guards, State officials and other functionaries
were detained. Some of them were set free, while others were sent to special prison camps
established by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in Kozelsk,
Ostashkov and Starobelsk.
2.2
In early March 1940, Lavrentiy Beria, Head of the NKVD, submitted to Joseph
Stalin, Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a proposal to
approve the shooting of Polish prisoners of war as enemies of the Soviet State. The
proposal specified that the prisoner-of-war camps accommodated 14,736 former military
and police officers, of whom more than 97 per cent were of Polish nationality, and that a
further 10,685 Polish nationals were being held in the prisons of the western districts of
Ukraine and Belarus. On 5 March 1940, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the
Soviet Communist Party approved the proposal and ordered the shooting of the detained
prisoners of war. The cases were to be considered by an NKVD troika 1 without the
detainees being summoned or the charges being disclosed and without any statements
concerning the conclusion of the investigation or the bills of indictment being issued to
them.
2.3
Between April and May 1940, 21,857 persons were executed. Only 395 detainees
were released. Prisoners from the Kozelsk camp were killed at a site near Smolensk known
as the Katyn Forest; those from the Starobelsk camp were shot in the NKVD prison in
Kharkov and their bodies buried near the village of Pyatikhatki; the police officers from
Ostashkov were killed in the NKVD prison in Kalinin (now Tver) and buried in Mednoye.
2.4
The authors allege that their relatives, as follows, were killed in 1940:
• M.A., born in 1903, the father of K.K. and I.E., was taken prisoner after 20
September 1939, killed in Tver and buried in Mednoye;
• W.W., born in 1909, the father of W.W-J., was taken prisoner on 19 or 20
September 1939, killed on 30 April 1940 and buried in Katyn;
• S.R., born in 1883, the grandfather of W.R., was taken prisoner around 20
September 1939 and buried in Katyn;
• S.E., born in 1900, the father of G.E., presumed killed in Kharkov and buried in
Pyatikhatki;
• S.T., born in 1900, the father of A.T., was arrested on 17 September 1939, killed in
Tver and buried in Mednoye;
• A.W., born in 1897, the father of J.L.W., was arrested in October 1939, killed in
Tver and buried in Mednoye.
2.5
In 1942 and 1943, the German army, advancing onto the territory of the Soviet
Union, discovered mass burials near the Katyn forest. An international commission
consisting of 12 forensic experts was set up. It conducted the exhumation works from April
to June 1943. The remains of 4,243 Polish officers were excavated, of whom 2,730 were
identified. Among those identified were the relatives of two of the authors, S.R. and W.W.
The commission concluded that the Soviet authorities had been responsible for the
massacre. The Soviet authorities denied responsibility for the killings and in 1943 the
NKVD set up an Extraordinary State Commission chaired by Nikolai Burdenko, which
concluded on 22 January 1944 that the Polish prisoners had been executed by the Germans
in the autumn of 1941.
2.6
On 3 March 1959, Aleksandr Shelepin, Chairman of the successor to the NKVD, the
Committee for State Security (KGB), proposed to the Secretary-General of the Soviet
Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, that the records and other materials regarding the
execution of Polish prisoners of war be destroyed, except the reports of the meetings of the
NKVD troika sentencing the persons to be shot and the documents on the execution of that
decision.
1
2
A trial commission that conducted summary justice proceedings.